Wednesday, February 8, 2017

For various reasons, both personal and professional, I have had to
neglect my blog for the past few months.
I apologize. However, there is
one very sad circumstance I feel I cannot neglect—the passing of a short story
writer whose work I respect. When such a person dies, I feel honor bound to reread
some of his or her stories and write a brief tribute on what I admire about
their work. Last month it was William Trevor. Today it is Bharati Mukherjee,
who died last week of a heart condition in New York City.

I met Bharati many years ago at
one of the International Short Story Conferences in Iowa City, at which I was
making a presentation about the form and she was reading one of her stories. I
sat and watched her working hard at her large laptop one day while having a cup
of coffee at the cafeteria. She looked up and smiled shyly, saying, “We have to
take what time we can find, don’t we?”

The headline for the obit in The
New York Times stated:” Bharati Mukherjee, Writer of Immigrant Life, Dies
at 76.” Since subject matter rather than style is more accessible and recognizable
to most readers, especially if it is timely subject matter, I suppose it was
inevitable that “Immigrant” was the key word in the headline. It would hardly
attract much attention if the key words had been “Writer of Perfectly Constructed
Short Stories.”

Bharati and I shared greetings in the halls of various conferences on the
Short Story over the years. We did not know each other well; we simply knew each
other’s work. The last time I shared the platform with her was in Lisbon,
Portugal a few years ago, when she and I and Francine Prose talked about the
short story. When I was making my presentation, elevating the form of the short
story above cultural content, the cantankerous writer Amira Baraka (formerly Leroi
Jones) stood up, waved his arms at me impatiently, and stormed out. Later at
his own luncheon presentation, he snuffed and snorted about me as if I were the
epitome of racist white conservatism. At a cocktail party that night, Bharati
came up to me, put her hand on my shoulder, and told me not to fret, for
everyone encountered the raging resentment of Baraka at one time or another.

I won’t summarize the facts of Bharati’s life; you can find bios in
various online places. Instead I want to discuss briefly one of her
best-known short stories—“The Management of Grief”—from her collection The Middleman and Other Stories,” which
won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1988.

Twelve years ago in an interview in the Associated Writing Programs Chronicle, Mukherjee stated
emphatically: “I’m an American writer who happens to be from South Asia. I hope no one sees me or my fiction as
representing the entire Indian community…. I think minority writers are
particularly prone to turning characters of fiction into representations in a
political agenda. The result is that you
may produce novels that are useful as texts in social studies or women’s
studies courses, but they will never be fine literature.”

This suggestion that writing directed toward a political agenda is
often incompatible with fine literature is the position I expressed in Lisbon
that raised the ire of Amira Baraka. It
goes against a popular academic position expressed ten years earlier by the
highly respected theorist/critic Frederic Jameson in his essay “Third World
Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Jameson declared that third
world literatures were necessarily national allegories. “The story of the
private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of
the public third world culture and society.”

In an essay in The Journal of
Modern Literature in 1996, critic Thomas Palakeel argued that Jameson’s
theory not only attributes a false sense of power to the literatures of the
Third World, “but also reduces all the writings of the non-Western world to a tidy,
one-dimensional aesthetic.” He insists that it is the “close reading” that
scratches off the allegorical and political and reveals the literary.”

This position was Bharati’s view also, as it is the view of many short
story writers, who value the precise way short stories focus on the personal
and the universal, rather than the local and the social.

“The Management of Grief” focuses on Shaila Bhave’s efforts to deal
with the death of her entire family—her husband and two sons—in the 1985 Air
India crash over Ireland that killed over two hundred. The title of the story
has a certain wry bitterness, for to suggest that grief of such magnitude can
somehow be “managed,” as if it were a business deal is ludicrous and heartless. However, it seems to be the only way that a
government can try to help its people “manage” grief. Judith Templeton, a government appointee, has
her textbooks on grief management that outline the stages of grief. She has come to seek Mrs. Bhave’s help because
she seems to have dealt with her loss with such calm acceptance. But Shaila
says her reaction is that of a freak—that the “terrible calm” she feels will
just not go away—that she can be no help to others, for, “We must all grieve in
our own way.

And this is what the story is about. Although it may be true that death
can be “managed” in a social ritual of a funeral or wake in which people gather
together to mark the passing of someone.
But it is probably also true that “grief” is purely personal. It is why
we feel so helpless to do anything when we witness its external manifestations
in another person. As opposed to the government way of managing grief, the Indian
way is that of denial, insisting that it is a parent’s duty to hope. The Irish,
whose dependence on government has never been very strong, hug the widows and
mothers, and bring them flowers.

At the end of the story, Mrs. Bhave says she flutters between two
different worlds, two modes of knowledge. She does not know how to tell Templeton
that her family surrounds her in her mind like shape-shifters in epics. When Templeton
despairs of ever convincing the Indian families that the government is there to
help them, Shaila wants to tell her, “In our culture, it is a parent’s duty to
hope.” And then she walks away from Templeton,
determined to find her own way to grieve.
The story ends with her hearing the voices of her family telling to be
brave, and her admission that she does not know where her voyage will end and
which direction to take. There is no resolution to loss, no management of
grief; if one can, one simply goes on.

I extend my sympathies to Bharati Mukherjee’s family and friends. I admired her greatly and shall remember her
always. There is no way to “manage” my
profound sense of loss.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Ah. The story she told in Vienna of being married in her lunch break, by the lawyer whose office was in the bottom half of the house. That love, that optimism, that willingness to work so hard at her relationship, and how all those traits were echoed in stories she told about her practice of writing. I am so sorry for our loss.

Tenth Anniversary of My Blog

Friday, Nov. 16, is the tenth anniversary of my blog. I have been taking some time off because I have been working on a new book on the short story. I have submitted a proposal to a publisher and am waiting for a reply. I will let you know when I hear from them. Thank you for continuing to read essays in my archives.

Now Available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle

Click cover to go to Amazon and read the Introduction and first chapter.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."